Idle Time

By which I mean, sources that you can check periodically or subscribe to to receive a steady stream of free music.

For music podcasts, use a regular RSS reader (or a dedicated podcatcher, if you have one), not iTunes. I’ve had problems convincing iTunes to accept files into its Music library that I’d downloaded through its podcatcher.

• Free stuff on iTunes: Three songs, one music video, zero or more (usually zero) audiobook excerpts, and zero or more (usually more) episodes of TV shows every week.

• Free stuff on Amazon: As of this writing, 665 songs (once over 3000). At least one new song every week.

• eMusic’s Daily Download (podcast feed) is available to the public. That was a pleasant surprise; I commend eMusic for it. (Added 2008-12-09)

• The Current’s Song of the Day podcast: One song per weekday from Minnesota Public Radio’s station The Current.

• Deutsche-Welle’s Beethoven podcast: Not just Beethoven; it includes other composers’ works, as well. Generally updates once a year.

• Deutsche-Welle’s Classical Masterpieces podcast: This one only ran for a limited time, but the feed is still available. My suggestion: Subscribe, grab everything, then unsubscribe.

• Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape: A new round of 10 tracks every 8 weeks. The webpage is a Flash app, but there is an “MP3 Download” button that serves up a zip archive. (UPDATE 2008-12-09: Here’s their feed. The item you want is labeled “MP3 Download”. No enclosures; you’ll need to go to the webpage.)

• Triple J, a radio station in Australia. Appears to be mostly rock/pop. No fixed interval, but they do have a podcast feed. Thanks to Matt for suggesting it in a comment.

• KEXP has a Song of the Day podcast (podcast feed), which is weekdaily. As of this writing, there are 637 songs in the archive. Caution: Not all the songs are tagged, so you may have to do some tag repair.

• McGuinn’s Folk Den (podcast feed), wherein Roger McGuinn records and posts one folk song a month. You’ll need to tag the files yourself. Thanks to Jesse for suggesting it in a comment.

• Stereogum runs one song (sometimes two) per weekday. They have a dedicated section for these MP3s (podcast feed), including monthly zip archives of all the MP3s back to December 2006, available by direct download or BitTorrent. (Added 2008-12-17)

• MBV is a network of several MP3 blogs: Said the Gramophone, Fluxblog, Largehearted Boy, The Catbirdseat, and Chromewaves. The MBV site aggregates the member sites. (Added 2008-12-17; thanks to Colin for suggesting Said the Gramophone on Twitter)

• Largehearted Boy is one of the MBV sites, but one thing you don’t get in the MBV feed is the Daily Downloads posts. These are chock-full of up to a dozen free songs each day, all direct from the labels and promotion firms (so, all legal). The Daily Downloads also usually include tapings of live shows, either hosted on the Internet Archive or distributed via BitTorrent.

• NME is a music news website and magazine based in the UK. One of the website’s departments is The Daily Download (podcast feed).

• Spinner is AOL’s music blog. Unlike most of these, it doesn’t have a dedicated daily-download feed, but thanks to Yahoo! Pipes, I was able to make such a feed.

• Greg Hewgill maintains a list of torrents of music from the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) conference. He hosts most of these himself, but Ben Stolt is running the 2009 torrent. All of the torrents consist of music from the SXSW website.

  The music from 2009 is the largest serving yet: 1,265 files weighing a total of 6.15 GiB, divided among three torrents. For reference, that’s more songs than are in the first 2+¼ years of Stereogum’s MP3 archive.

These are some sites that I don’t personally subscribe to, but am aware of and occasionally benefit from indirectly (e.g., when Largehearted Boy posts a link to a Team Love track):

• A site called RCRD LBL has a blog called RCRD SELECTOR, which provides a few free songs per day. The feed doesn’t use enclosure tags, which makes podcatching difficult, but I’m listing it anyway in case you’re OK with that.

• You Ain’t No Picasso is primarily a music blog, although it has the occasional non-music-related post. Not every post has MP3s on it, but most do. Has a feed, but no enclosure tags. (Added 2008-12-17; thanks to Mike Krieger for linking to one of their posts on Twitter, and Colin for retweeting that link)

• The Hype Machine aggregates a lot of MP3 blogs, including the aforementioned Stereogum. Has a feed, but no enclosure tags. (Added 2008-12-17; thanks to Colin for suggesting it on Twitter)

• Team Love is a record label that gives away songs on their Library page. There’s no dedicated Library feed, so you’ll have to check back periodically (Tuesdays?).

  One thing you’ll notice is that the front page says in one paragraph that the Library is “open to the public 24/7”, and then in the next paragraph that you’ll need to open an account. There is some open-to-the-public access on the right side of the page (“Artists” and “Featured MP3s”); I don’t know what an account gets you.

  Added 2008-12-17. Thanks to Matt Morrell, who is a musician himself (with at least one song of his own available for free) and sent me the link on Twitter.

• KRCW’s Today’s Top Tune podcast is another weekdaily rock-music podcast (with, of course, a a podcast feed). Note that not every episode is a song; for example, right now, the oldest of the three episodes in the feed is an interview with Tony Hawk. Note also that the song files have borked tags, with the artist in the title tag and the song title nowhere; you’ll have to fix these yourself.

  KCRW has other shows, but it looks like Today’s Top Tune is the only one you can stock your music library from. (Corrections welcome.)

  Thanks to Steven for linking to Today’s Top Tune in a comment.

If you know of other, similar sources, I invite you to link to them in the comments.

UPDATE 2009-03-26: Segregated sites I don’t subscribe to into their own list, and added Largehearted Boy, NME, and Spinner.
UPDATE 2009-04-06: Demoted KCRW to the sources-I-don’t-subscribe-to list. I get enough music from other sources now that I don’t care about it enough to deal with its broken tagging scheme.

Categories: Amazon MP3 Store; iTunes/iPod; Music. | Comments: 3 (feed).